CO chemical lasers using O/O.sub.2 /CS.sub.2 reactants require the generation of large quantities of atomic oxygen which presents sufficient difficulties to make this system impractical for large scale devices. It is therefore mandatory to develop techniques for fueling the CO chemical laser with reactants which can be practically generated and allow scaling of the CO chemical laser system to high optical energy output. An important advance made in this application is demonstration that a chain reaction mechanism is operative in a CS/O.sub.2 fueled CO chemical laser. This mode of operation reduces the requirement for O-atoms.
All previous continuous wave (cw) CO chemical lasers have operated using the O/O.sub.2 /CS.sub.2 reaction system. The performance of this system has been well-characterized, and a first approximation to the chemical kinetics can be made using the "three-reaction model," EQU O + CS.sub.2 .fwdarw.CS + SO - 21 kcal, (1) EQU O + CS.fwdarw.CO* + S - 85 kcal, and (2) EQU S + O.sub.2 .fwdarw.SO + O - 5.6 kcal. (3)
Experimental studes of the O/O.sub.2 /CS.sub.2 laser confirm that the net effect of these reactions is to produce one excited CO molecule (CO*) for each input O-atom. Thus, the performance and scaling of the O/O.sub.2 /CS.sub.2 laser are determined to a large extent by the characteristics of the O-atom source. At present there exists no practical, scalable technique for producing large flows of O-atoms or S-atoms, which are equivalent chain reaction initiators.
Co-pending application Ser. No. 648,273 filed Jan. 12, 1976 as a continuation of Ser. No. 473,695 filed May 28, 1974 entitled CHEMICALLY FUELED LASER by Jeffers et al discloses a CO laser in which CS fuel is reacted with O-atoms to produce excited CO. One of the principal objects of this invention is to reduce the requirement for O-atoms and to increase the optical performance of the O/O.sub.2 /CS/CS.sub.2 chemical laser system.